If I do not have medical insurance, what problems can I face?
Some patients go without adequate care because they cannot afford it. Watch as Steven Rosenberg, MD, discusses the right to be healthy and what he calls “the shame of health care.”
Transcript
--who have to decide whether or not they're going to have dinner that night or they're going to buy a medicine that will decrease their blood pressure or help treat
their cancer. [MUSIC PLAYING]
We see a lot of patients here at the National Cancer Institute that have not received adequate treatment
outside of this institution because they could not afford it. They did not have health insurance. Now we don't charge for any care here at the NIH.
There are no hospital costs. There are no physician costs. There are no drug costs. It's one of the jewels of the US government.
This institution, the National Institutes of Health, exists for one purpose only, and that is to create tomorrow's medicine,
not to practice today's medicine. And so every patient that we bring into the hospital has a problem that can't be cured by today's medicine.
And at least, in my own personal experience, although this is common knowledge, there are a lot of people in the United States that are
uninsured who cannot get adequate care, who have to decide whether or not they're going to have
dinner that night or they're going to buy a medicine that will decrease their blood pressure or help treat their cancer.
I think it's one of the great shames that we confront in this country. The right to be healthy and to seek health
should be a predominant right. I mean, what good is the freedom of the press if you're deathly ill?
So the fact that we have so many uninsured people in this country is what I refer to as the shame of health care.
health care
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